According to Census Bureau estimates, sometime during the wee
hours Tuesday the U.S. population will pass 300 million.
We won’t know when or who, exactly, will have the honor of being
that person. No prize is being offered, since we only have
estimates. Nor will the occasion be a cause for celebration, the
way the 100 million and 200 million marks were. And as befits the
political climate, we’ve fallen to disputing its meaning, with the
only clear loser being
Population Connection
– once known as Zero Population Growth.
According to Census Bureau estimates, sometime during the wee hours Tuesday the U.S. population will pass 300 million.
We won’t know when or who, exactly, will have the honor of being that person. No prize is being offered, since we only have estimates. Nor will the occasion be a cause for celebration, the way the 100 million and 200 million marks were. And as befits the political climate, we’ve fallen to disputing its meaning, with the only clear loser being
Population Connection – once known as Zero Population Growth.
The fact that the 300 millionth American is as likely to be an immigrant as a baby – or even more likely, an immigrant baby – has exacerbated an unfortunate xenophobic streak in America. The billions we’re spending on a Mexican border fence is looking more and more like an effort to make sure that the 400 millionth American is named Joe or Mary, not Jose or Maria.
There’s also a dispute over whether the 300 millionth American is more likely to be a Republican or a Democrat 18 years hence, when registering to vote in the 2024 presidential election.
A couple of months ago Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Affairs, published an essay in the Wall Street Journal under the title “The Fertility Gap.” In it he claimed that data from something called the “General Social Survey” proves that conservatives are breeding like randy liberals – and making babies at a 41 percent faster clip.
He did not claim conservatives were having more, or more importantly better, sex, just that Republicans have more money and live in nicer homes and can afford to hire nannies to steep their children in Family Values.
Liberal demographers struck back, saying that Brooks had discounted the prodigious progeny of immigrants, who as we all know are poor, Democratic, breed like jackrabbits in the Sonoran desert and, alas, tend not to vote.
So who will that 300 millionth American turn out to be in the 2024 voting booth? If heterosexual conservatives are ascendant, will liberals continue to overcome this disadvantages through imports?
What really matters, claim those looking forward to 2024, is whether children tend to follow in their parents’ ideological and spiritual footsteps.
“Virtually nothing is more predictive of your political ideology than that of your parents,” wrote Vicki Haddock recently in the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s more of a determining factor than income, education or any other societal yardstick.”
Yet there is a counterforce at work. A New York Times article two weeks ago described a rising fear in evangelical families that their children are being lost en masse to the blandishments of popular culture. “We’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe,” said Ron Luce, founder of Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry.
“Hooking up” – that is, sex – seems, as usual, to be the culprit, demonstrating again that the devil is really responsible for our impulse to go forth and multiply, and that a Clintonesque God has been trying for millennia, with limited success, to co-opt the message.
Rebellion against convention may turn out to be youthful folly and without long-term political consequences. But whether or not that is so, Republicans may not be able to rely forever on the support of religious conservatives. If evangelicals ever wake up to how they’ve been exploited by Republicans – keep an eye out for David Kuo’s book on the topic, “Tempting Faith,” due out this week – the political deck
could get a good shuffling.
We’re not doomed to adopt the same predilections as our parents, any more than political parties can always rely on the support of certain groups. If that were so, how would that account for gays, especially gay Republicans, who tend to breed hardly at all, and when they do seem to have the usual number of hetero, possibly liberal, kids?
There’s reason for hope. At the rate we’re going, by 2024 we may pass 400 million. And since I’ll be 70 that year, I’m hoping all those new and younger workers will keep my Social Security checks from bouncing.
But I’m a little nervous too. I’m just six years shy of the age at which my father flipped from Democrat to Republican. Who does that suggest I’ll be voting for in 2024 – Jenna Bush or Chelsea Clinton?
